I only ever wrote one short story. It's called Practical Gifts, and here it is.

I find short stories difficult to write, but I'm pretty pleased with this one. I wrote it several years ago, for a friend, though I don't think she ever read it. If she had, she probably would have hated it.

From the Wikipedia entry on the twist ending

"Chekhov's gun is premised on the notion that the physical details of a story should relate to the plot, or should not be included. The term comes from a letter Anton Chekhov wrote to a colleague: 'One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.' In literature, Chekhov's gun refers to a situation in which a character or plot element is introduced early but not referenced again until much later within the narrative. This device is used in much of modern literature and film: A seemingly trivial event turns out at the end to be pivotal to the story's outcome. Similar to this literary device is a 'plant.' A 'plant' is a preparatory device that repeats throughout the story. Upon arriving at the resolution, circumstances change enough to cause the 'plant' to take on a new meaning."

"This part where I take the gun is like, duh, important."

This is Wikipedia, of course, so I have no idea whether or not Anton Chekhov actually made the statement above, but it is an idea that a lot of people hold. Certainly a lot of movies seem to be assembled with this idea in mind.

On one hand, you do have to establish the things which are going to appear (and be significant) later on in the story. For a negative example, halfway through the movie Tough Guys Don't Dance, the protagonist suddenly has a dog, which is almost immediately killed, and he's pissed off about that. It doesn't mean anything to the audience, however (when I saw the movie, it got a laugh), since there had never been any previous indication in the film that the character even had a dog, let alone that he cared about it.

As Al Schroeder (the creator of Mindmistress) pointed out recently, it was common in early issues of the Fantastic Four comic book for the story to start with Reed Richards demonstrating a new invention (often with comical results), and then that invention would prove very important later on in the story.

But this does not mean that the opposite is true, that everything at the beginning has to end up being significant. Details included at the beginning of a story, even if never referred to again, can make the whole thing more believable and realistic. Many Sherlock Holmes stories begin with some description of Holmes' personal habits, or a list of other adventures, most of which are never mentioned again ("...the adventure of the Paradol Chamber, of the Amateur Mendicant Society, who held a luxurious club in the lower vault of a furniture warehouse, of the facts connected with the loss of the British bark Sophy Anderson, of the singular adventures of the Grice Patersons in the island of Uffa, and finally of the Camberwell poisoning case.").

And when Holmes and Watson are off after a criminal, Holmes often asks his trusted friend to bring along his old service revolver. This signifies to the reader that the situation is going to be serious and potentially dangerous, but there is still the likelihood that Holmes' intelligence will allow for a non-violent resolution.

This is true of Archie Goodwin (Nero Wolfe's assistant) as well. He had a rule for himself that he would never leave the house unarmed on any errand connected with a murder (no matter how trivial the errand itself might seem to be). In almost all cases, though, that gun stays in his shoulder holster.

If the reader has a reasonable expectation that every weapon mentioned will eventually be fired, you've just removed a fair amount of suspense about how the story will end. Now, admittedly the actual quote from Chekhov says that somebody has to be thinking about firing the gun, which is different from actually firing it, but two other quotes on wikipedia (and the actual example, from Uncle Vanya) involve shooting the thing, not just thinking about it.

After all, if a loaded gun is placed in an inhabited room, somebody will think about using it.

I have one character who is usually armed, and I can't remember a time when he's even drawn a gun, let alone fired it.

If everything pays off, and the audience knows to expect that, then the story becomes mechanical and airless. As Roger Ebert put it once, you can feel the presence of the screenplay, determining the action.

Nowadays, when I see a gun reveal early in a movie, I just laugh, since I know it will inevitably turn out to be (duh) important later. Unlike in real life.

Later: Further discussion of this point, in various places, brought out one additional factor, which is genre expectations. A gun being revealed in a romantic comedy, for example, is not the same as a gun being revealed in a mystery story. If you suddenly insert a gun into a romantic comedy, there should be a good reason.

There’s a new scene, or the first part of it, over at utownwriting.com. I’ll try to finish it next week.

I’ve also gone through the site and changed the links at the end of the posts. Now they are hard-coded links, to the next and previous pages, rather than the automatic links to the next and previous posts. This distinction doesn’t matter much now, but it will matter more in the future, since the sequence of the posts may not always be the sequence of the stories themselves.

A reader asked how much of my writing is planned in advance, and how much is spontaneous.

I replied that it has varied. A Sane Woman had a plan. Since I respect the detective story genre (I'm not just using it, or mocking it, or deconstructing it, or whatever), I planned the whole story out in advance. Many things changed as I went along, mostly things discarded (or postponed until U-town) to streamline it, but I did mostly follow the original plan.

According to that plan, Nicky leaving Sarah to go and break into Perry's house was going to happen in A Sane Woman. Most of the A Visit to Perry chapter from the new novel was going to be included in the end of A Sane Woman, so the scene of Jan Sleet revealing the solution of the mystery would have been combined with discovering Nicky there, etc. Oy. It would have been way too much going on all at the same time.

Including Vicki in that chapter, and the idea that Nicky was really someone else, came later. Without that, without the hints that Nicky is traveling under an assumed identity, for a mysterious reason, the relationship between Nicky and Sarah tended to become too cute and unreal. That was a way to give it a bit darker quality (even before I figured out exactly who Nicky really was).

On the other hand, I've just been cleaning up some of the U-town files (just code and extra blank lines, not the text), and I discovered that there were some extra scenes in Curse the Darkness which were commented out (which makes them invisible, thereby screwing up the episode numbering, which I'm going to have to fix someday, though nobody has ever mentioned it). They were mostly scenes with Sam and Terry, since when I was writing U-town I had the idea that the two novels were happening concurrently. This proved to be completely unwieldy, and I abandoned the idea, making them consecutive instead, which also helped since Jan and Marshall's relationship is far more "mature" (if that's the correct word) in U-town.

U-town, on the other hand, was completely improvised, at least from the start up to the re-opening of Duffy's. It was streamlined in rewrites (for example, removing the cut-ups which ended up, at least for now, in the first part of the new novel), but not substantially altered. I was writing with no real plan at all, posting scenes on the BBSs as they were finished.

This is when a friend commented that my writing was too much like real life.

At that point, basically with the reopening of Duffy's (and remember with A Sane Woman happening also), things were out of control and I needed to rein them in. So, from there to the "end" (Pete and starling on the rooftop, with the bombing going on), things were planned out, but that's where I was stuck for a while, until I figured out where to go from there.

The new novel has not had a real plan, not event to event, but it is far more under control than U-town was, since I've had a pretty good idea where I was going. As I said before, I've known for a long time where Vicki was going to end up, and SarahBeth, too. Tammy came as much more of a surprise, though, as did the fact that Pete and Katherine ended up playing such a major role.

Oh,well, as Orson Welles said about making movies, "I always make a plan. Then I end up having to throw it out, but I always make it."

Word Play

The reader also commented on my "characteristic word play," specifically mentioning the Professor saying, "We've been festooning for hours." I had to admit that this phrase was not original with me, it's from a Bob & Ray radio program, probably from the 1950s, originally said by the character Mary McGoon. Credit where credit is due, after all.

As for the rest of the wedding, the song the Professor sings was somehow inspired by the movie The Aristocrats, though I don't remember if it was from something specific in that movie, or just the general essence of it. The idea of a certificate is something I've seen in Quaker weddings.

The rest of it: the participation of Daphne, the sprinkling of beer, the unusual rings, all that is mine. Oh, and Vicki saying, "By the authority vested in me by nobody in particular," is from a Fantastic Four comic. That's what Reed Richards said when he welcomed Crystal into the FF.

Also

In this entry, I talked about how certain details from the TV show Dark Shadows have been stored in my brain for around 35 years.

Thinking about it since, I'm thinking that it may have influenced my writing, too. Specifically, I've been thinking about how Tammy is similar to Angelique. They are both quite powerful, and they are both snobs, the kind of snobbery that people develop when they are somewhat ashamed of their own "humble" beginnings. They can be quite bitchy, but each has moments of compassion as well, which she usually tries to conceal. Angelique would have understood Tammy's unusual method of ordering in restaurants, and the way she dealt with a few threatening situations in this chapter. There is obviously a physical similarity as well (both are beautiful blondes, though I don't know if I've ever specified the color of Tammy's eyes). Tammy is less of a romantic, and she has more of a sense of humor, but there is a similarity between them.

Angelique is always frustrated because, despite all her power, she can't make Barnabas love her, and (on the other side), Tammy values Sam so much because he does love her, and she knows it's real and not manipulated by her.

Also, there are events around two-thirds of the way through U-town – I'm being deliberately vague here – which are probably influenced by the purpose and outcome of Barnabas and Julia's trip to 1840 after the destruction of Collinwood in their own time.